Mark Millar Given The “Joss Whedon Role” Over Fox’s Marvel Movies

Following Marvel’s lead in giving Joss Whedon on over-all consultancy role for their movie making endeavours, Fox have done the same with Mark Millar and their Marvel movies. At the moment this entails The Wolverine, X-Men: Days of Future Past and Fantastic Four, but it’s bound not to end there.

Here’s Millar’s statement:

As someone who has spent his entire life obsessed with both comic-books and movies, this is essentially my dream gig as it’s a unique combination of both.

I spent ten years working at Marvel and am really happy with the work I did on the comic side of things so the idea of working with these characters now in a brand new medium is enormously exciting for me. I really like the Fox team, love this bold new direction they have for their franchises and am proud to be working alongside some of modern cinema’s biggest talents.

James Mangold is incredible, Matthew Vaughn’s one of my closest pals and Josh Trank gave us, in my opinion, one of the greatest superhero movies of the last decade with Chronicle. The invitation to join this crew was maybe the coolest phone-call I’ve ever had.

Now we’ll never see Miracle Park, eh?

Note: that’s the first official word from Fox that Trank is in charge of The Fantastic Four.

You know, it does seem a bit unfortunate that Millar cohort Joe Carnahan saw his Daredevil film hit the wall at Fox recently.

It’s not clear if the plan is to work up inter-related elements and crossovers, as per the Avengers initiative, but the press release says:

Millar will work with Fox on developing new avenues for its X-Men and Fantastic Four tentpoles.

What will that mean? Slightly less obvious spin-offs, maybe, like a proper, stand-alone Silver Surfer film, or something New Mutants-y? Or maybe cartoons, film-universe comics, videogames… something properly ancillary. Time will tell, but I bet Millar starts dropping hints as soon as he can…

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